He said, she said
9 November 2022 06:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeThe anti-said brigade (who would be more convincing if they were more literate):
Do I want to read this timeless epic? No, I do not.
Trying for a 'super intense' rewrite, as described:
"Don't die." He stared down desperately into eyes that were already glazing, tightening his grip as if to ward off the inevitable by sheer force of will. "You can't do this to me, do you hear? I won't have it. Don't you dare-- don't--"
But Talke's head fell back heavily, and the ragged words ripped into a scream that was swallowed by the shellfire overhead.
Your telling me, somone is writing a super intense scene about loosing their best friend in a warzone, firefights overhead and chaos all around them:
"Don't die on me." He said.
or
"Don't die on me!" He Screamed!
WHICH IS BETTER!?!?!
Do I want to read this timeless epic? No, I do not.
Trying for a 'super intense' rewrite, as described:
"Don't die." He stared down desperately into eyes that were already glazing, tightening his grip as if to ward off the inevitable by sheer force of will. "You can't do this to me, do you hear? I won't have it. Don't you dare-- don't--"
But Talke's head fell back heavily, and the ragged words ripped into a scream that was swallowed by the shellfire overhead.
no subject
Date: 2022-11-11 07:03 pm (UTC)But regardless, the exclamation marks in that original post really got me. It's like the character is screaming at his friend, and the narrator is screaming at the reader about the character screaming at his friend. Uuhhh... intense. Kudos to the original poster for not using caps too.
I think that most people who encourage writers to use "said" more often aren't trying to dissuade anyone from using "scream" when someone is screaming. Although in this case I probably would have went for "shout" (and then I would have wondered why not "yell", and then I probably would have emailed you to ask about it :)). But back to the point, I think the general advice is to use "said" instead of replacing it with something that feels unnatural, convoluted, confusing or downright awkward.
So the original post is pretty much missing the point.
Anyway, here's something nice:
no subject
Date: 2022-11-11 07:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-11 07:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-12 06:58 pm (UTC)I'm afraid the first thing that jumped out at me was the dialogue tags being mispunctuated and miscapitalised as sentence fragments!
It hadn't occurred to me that the poster might have chosen to perpetrate capitals for emphasis in the dialogue as well, so I suppose we should be grateful for small mercies :-p
Yes, the point is that you can do far worse damage by going to great lengths to avoid using "said" than you can by just going ahead and using it. It becomes particularly obvious when you're reading a long passage of dialogue and every single dialogue tag is yet another desperate attempt at variation...
The argument that "you shouldn't use 'said' because it gets really repetitive when the text is being read out in an audio-book" feels pretty irrelevant to me -- it's like saying that chapters shouldn't be more than 1000 words long because otherwise it takes up too many screens on Wattpad. (Or, as I have seen in book reviews, complaining that the book relies on diagrams which are not accessible in the audio-book version.)
Up until very recently, books were never *expected* to be consumed as recordings; the ones that did get released were normally abridged to two or three cassettes for the purpose, rather than consisting of twenty hours of so of verbatim text being dictated off the page. (And I speak as someone who actually did read the entirety of "The Lord of the Rings" out loud unabridged in the form of a massively ongoing bed-time story...)
But it's true that reading prose and particularly dialogue out loud is a good way of judging it, so I suspect that what these people are actually saying is that boring, badly-written dialogue becomes much more obvious in the form of an audio-book :(
no subject
Date: 2022-11-14 08:40 pm (UTC)Also, look what happens on Tumblr when someone points out, via an anonymous ask not, that the author uses 'purr' (instead of 'said') too often. You can see the reactions in the notes (in the comments and in the reblogs with comments). I don't know the author or her work, but if she's anything like most people writing Loki x Reader on Tumblr, then 'purr', 'coo', 'hum' are the standard way to say 'say'. :)
links
I love Tumblr. But I'm starting to blame it for the death of the concrit culture.
no subject
Date: 2022-11-16 11:50 pm (UTC)Oh good, now I shan't have to get round to answering your comments within the time that a reasonable person might bother to come back and check for replies ;-)
Assuming that you actually remember to log in, that is :-p
And assuming that the 'email me if someone responds to my comment' notification is on by default, which it may not be...
Well, I can see why the request has to be made anonymously :-(
"Don't like it, don't read it" isn't going to cut any of these writers much ice if they try to branch out beyond the self-reinforcing tropes of online smut; editors won't like it, and they won't read it -- or print it either. But then this is probably the type of author who believes that the world is full of 'entitled gatekeepers' just trying to stifle their daringly transgressive self-expression (and who doesn't believe in proof-reading before self-publishing either)...
The trouble with smut, in my opinion, is that all too often it does rely on repetitive words and phrases that are supposed to evoke the desired response simply by existing :-(
I had a look at some of her WARNING WARNING WARNING Not Safe For Work stuff (none of which chapters did in fact contain anything more suggestive than Sigyn holding a knife to her husband's throat because she thought he was an imposter), and I couldn't see that she had used the word 'purr' at all. So I can't think why she is getting so defensive about it!
(For some reason I find the idea of Loki x Reader, or indeed Loki x anyone, instinctively off-putting. Possibly because Loki's character in the movies that I've seen has been so totally unromantic -- he has zero canon seduction moves, so that's got to be *complete* gratuitous fantasy, a.k.a. character-rape...)
If I read about dialogue being 'purred', I'd normally associate that with threat -- it's the sort of thing Bond villains do :-P
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Date: 2022-11-20 05:29 pm (UTC)So it seems I was wrong to assume that the author is writing Loki x Reader. My bad. It must be because most Loki smut I came across on Tumblr was x reader. Not sure if you're familiar with that (I wasn't); it's mainly second person narration, with the reader being the POV character. And the reader character is usually called Y/N (as in: insert your name here). :) Funny.
It's true that Loki doesn't have any kind of romantic encounters in the movies (he does in the series, but that's another story, and another Loki - goofy and clownish). Then again, I don't think that a character not having romantic relationships in the source material necessarily implies that he could not flirt or fall in love or have sex if the context was different.
There is, in fact, a very vocal community on Tumblr arguing that Loki must be aromantic because he's not making out with anyone in the movies. And I'm always thinking that maybe he's just caught up with other things, you know? :)
But I do agree with you that it would be hard to write Loki smut while making sure he's in character, because canon gives zero clues about what would be in-character for 'smutty Loki'. I think the Loki x reader community pretty much created its own version of him, and writers largely stick to that.
I was a bit envious of those authors when I first joined Tumblr. They have so many notes and reblogs and comments! Sometimes I post snippets from my wip, scenes that can sort of stand on their own without further context, and I have only four people reading them. XD
But after a while, that changed my take on things: it's not a competition or a race to the top. It's just a bunch of people typing down whatever it is that they'd like to read. Creating stuff, in different ways. One big, heterogeneous mess. And that's quite cool. :)
But I'm still unhappy about the sense of entitlement that seems to come with it. The fact that concrit is no longer the norm but an exception that is seldomly accepted. And I know that people who read my texts (few as they are, both the readers and my texts) would not consider saying, "I loved this, but that bit right there felt off." That's quite a loss.
no subject
Date: 2022-11-29 02:18 pm (UTC)It occurs to me belatedly that the absence of purring in those particular chapters may not have been unrelated to the absence of smut ;-D
(I went back into her blog and tried to relocate them, but it had filled up with vast quantities of female salivation in the meantime, and I really couldn't take more than twelve pages of speculation on Tom Hiddleston's thighs...)
Yes, I came across that in the context of its being banned from FFNet. It seemed, and still seems, very weird to me; I find it impossible to imagine anybody identifying with a character literally called 'Your Name". If you really wanted to write smut that the reader could self-insert into (personally I can't think of anything less erotic than having *me* in there instead of having it happening to somebody else), then the obvious technique would be to write it in the first or second person without any names at all, with the protagonist just being addressed as 'darling' or whatever. The whole 'Y/N' thing just totally breaks immersion.
(And I've seen worse -- stories that expected you to insert 'your favourite food' or 'your favourite colour' into the spaces provided, presumably in the belief that this would create an extra-intense experience...)
Well yes, I think that he has a lot of rather more important matters on his mind ;-p
No, the fact that you don't see a character actively pursuing romantic relationships in canon (particularly if the source material is action- rather than romance-oriented) definitely doesn't prove that the character in question is neither interested nor capable under other circumstances. It's a bit like assuming that all the members of a single-sex expedition must therefore be homosexuals, because everyone always needs sex All the Time and there is nobody else available... most people are quite capable of thinking about other things.
Lancard, for example, shows zero interest in romance and is rather cynical about it, but that doesn't mind that he is either 'aromantic' or harbouring some kind of unrequited crush on Raoul. It just means that we happen not to see him at a point in his life when romance would be even vaguely relevant to his activities; in forty years' time, assuming he lives that long, he will probably have a string of grandchildren (and possibly a discreet mistress on the side, depending on how far his regard for 'rules' and 'duty' takes him in that direction).
But Loki as master of smut appears to be a complete fandom fabrication. Although I suppose that as a master deceiver and manipulator he would arguably be pretty good at seduction if he turned his mind to it, so it's not a *complete* stretch...!
Yes, I saw one of the (non-smut) entries on that blog saying "Don't worry if you only have fifty notes on your latest work of fiction" and my immediate thought was that they clearly have a totally different scale of reader engagement!
Although oddly enough the most recent one-shot I (re-)posted on AO3 feels as if it is doing much better than normal, even though when I look at the raw stats it doesn't seem to be scoring all that highly in comparison to the rest; I think it's just that the other works have been up there much longer and have more time to accumulate hits etc. But at the moment it keeps showing up in the stats with several(!) hits per day and a whole load of people adding kudos, bookmarks, etc.
I suspect that people may be filtering actively for 'Raoul/Christine' and 'Fluff', since the other one-shot I did with those tags also did pretty well -- objectively, I think, better, but not so far as I recall in such a continuing rush at the start. (Where my definition of 'rush' consists of 'receives 16 kudos in 24 days' ;-p)
To be fair, I'm not sure it was ever the case -- not from my memories of reading FFnet comments on stories from circa 2004, anyway, which were, as I recall, much more akin to Tumblr-style communication, since neither forums nor PMs existed on the site and there weren't a lot of external websites where fans could gather. It was just people chatting away and offering one another 'virtual cookies', and so on, quite as much as it was comment on the story itself -- let alone critique.